Dialectical, Unconscious, Portal Thinking

Seminars for the School of Thinking Year Upsilon 2023-24

Dialectical, Unconscious, Portal Thinking

Towards the end of my doctorate at the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), I was involved in a project that became the School of Thinking (SOT). The School of Thinking had the goal of opening up a new relationship to thinking, through the institutionalisation of what we might call an “ecology of thought/concept”. The ecology of thought/concept is a process whereby students are exposed to different forms of thinking as such (e.g. cognitivist, systems, complexity, ethical, etc.). Each teacher in the School of Thinking is responsible for teaching a different form of thinking. Since its inception, my role has been to teach dialectical thinking. So far there have been four iterations of the program.

This year, not only did I divide up my sessions at the School of Thinking into Dialectical Thinking, Unconscious Thinking and Portal Thinking, but I recorded the audio to make it available to a general audience on Philosophy Portal.

1. The seminar on dialectical thinking explores the nature of this form of thinking as a move from “worldview” to “ecology of concept” to “structure of ancient philosophical thinking” to the “structure of modern philosophical thinking”.

2. The seminar on unconscious thinking situates the discovery of the unconscious psyche in the context of 19th century philosophy, postmodern reaction to modern dialectical thinking, and the early phases of psychoanalysis.

3. The seminar on portal thinking features an open speculative cognition reflecting on the practical dynamics of navigating creativity between the horizon of the digital and physical institutions.

To access the seminars, see: SOT 2024.